A deserted island... a lost man... memories of a fatal crash... a book written by a dying explorer.
Dear Esther is a ghost story told using first-person gaming technologies. Rather than traditional gameplay, the focus here is on exploration, uncovering the mystery of the island, of who you are and why you are here. Fragments of story are randomly triggered by moving around the environments, making every telling unique. Features a stunning, specially commissioned soundtrack. Forget the normal rules of play; if nothing seems real here, it's because it may just be all a delusion.
What is the significance of the aerial - What happened on the motorway - is the island real or imagined - who is Esther and why has she chosen to summon you here?
The answers are out there, on the lost beach and the tunnels under the island. Or then again, they may just not be, after all...

Over the past few months I’ve been hard at work on the final level of Dear Esther, which has been progressing nicely for the most part; however, due to the sheer scale of the level, I have found that it’s taking me a lot longer than I had anticipated to get it finished. My biggest challenge with this level is not only detailing such a huge area and keeping it running smoothly, but also making sure it looks good on both a horizontal and vertical playing field; for example something that looks good at sea level can look awful from way up on the mount. However I feel like I'm finally getting the hang of it now and over the past few weeks have finished sculpting the level and am working on detailing the environment, some of which can be seen here: (Of course, very, very early WIP!)

Other than that there have also been a lot of small tweaks and improvements going on in the background to the source engine, the most significant of which would have to be the implementation of realistic detail foliage sway which has been also greatly optimised to use the GPU and the SSE instruction set, to quote my coder Jack Morgan:

"For Dear Esther Robert really wanted to push the limitations of the Source Engine’s foliage capabilities. Dear Esther sees the player exploring outdoor scenes of relative geometrically complexity and the ground surface in many of these scenes is dense with foliage. In their former state the mechanics driving the propagation and rendering of ground foliage were proving too costly to performance. As well the standing algorithms for simulating the wind’s effect on ground foliage were having a massive performance impact, and the end result appeared closer to a simulation of underwater currents on seaweed than wind on ground foliage.The solution to the performance problems was to defer as much of the calculation required to perform these tasks unto the GPU and calculating as much of what was left over using the SSE registries which were already being employed to handle some of the calculations on ground foliage but not to their full capacity.A complete redesign of the wind simulation was required to replace the 'underwater seaweed' effect with something which more accurately described ground foliage swaying in the wind. In short the new algorithm accounts for wind as a volume with a general direction which produces smaller volumes with more varied direction, on other words gusts."

If that made you go cross-eyed, then I have made a quick video to demonstrate the results of his jiggery-pokey: (NOTE: Video is a little jumpy and seems to be a little sped-up for some reason, but you get the idea!)

What this means is that I can now have sway on all of the foliage with very little extra cost, and as I think you’ll agree, it makes a huge difference in making the environment feel more alive!

What this means is that I can now have sway on all of the foliage with very little extra cost, and as I think you’ll agree, it makes a huge difference in making the environment feel more alive!Finally, I have decided to open up a Q&A session for the next update, so that I can help answer any questions you might have about Dear Esther. If you are scratching your head about anything, just submit your question in the comments and I will compile a list of answers for you in the next update!Not long to go now! :D

That processor is a little underwhelming but the rest should be ok, that means you MAY be able to play it, not definate. If you can play games like alien swarm which use the same engine, then I don't see what not.

GHz is almost useless to compare processors by these days. There are just too many other factors. It has been said over and over by the maker that if your computer can run HL2 Episode 2 then you will be fine.

Its like a Pure Orgams for Eyes..
WoW ...i ask myself for the System Specs that are needet to play this on High .. i expect something near Crisis on Middle ... Looks .. just .. WoW... i need it now , is there any Release Date or just TBD ^^?

I wonder if it would ever be possible to release extremely detailed insight into how you actually created the astonishing environments of Dear Esther? I'm not asking for tutorials, but rather what the workflow, shaders, algorithms and so on were and how they in turn benefitted the modification.

In other words, I don't want to know how you modelled, coded or textured. I want to know why and what your techniques are. After all; many of us can handle those processes, but your ability to take them to a whole new level is incomprehensible.

Holy **** this looks amazing. Not to be insulting, but the original, though fairly interesting and very original, wasn't terrible fun, and I fear this will be the same. I was wondering, would you be willing to let someone turn this into an L4D2 campaign? The zombies would look like utter **** in such a beautiful envornment, but it'd be a lot more fun to play IMO.

As some additional content once you have finished the story, maybe. (I think the game should have a few neat little extras after you have played for the nth time) But my no means emphasis on a L4D2 type shooter, I wouldn't download this mod if that's all I wanted from it. If it was a small unlockable after you have played through the story, then I think it would be nice!